On Aug. 15 last year, Board of Education members of FHSD voted to put three new policies in place that many believed would mean the end of “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Giver,” and other titles across the district.

“We do have the first amendment but we want to make sure that the resources available to kids are developmentally appropriate,” Luke Lammers, the Director of Curriculum for FHSD, said. “Some of Shakespeare’s titles probably wouldn’t be appropriate at the primary, K-5, level based on some of the content, but it’s totally fine for high schoolers.”

Six months later, however, a total of zero titles have been removed from the shelves of any district building due to a challenge. This is largely due to the policies and opportunities for alternative materials that were available to students before these new policies came into play. While removing a book from the shelves of a school district is occasionally the solution, more often than not it can be solved between individual students and their teachers.

“There are examples where a parent disagrees with a core text for an English class and they make their objection to that text known to the teacher and or the principals,” Lammers said. “In every case the teacher has worked with that family to provide an alternate text to be able to still accomplish the same educational objectives, to meet the same standards just through reading a different text, and that is pretty common in schools.”

The policy doesn’t only apply to books, it applies to all materials the Learning Commons and individual classes distribute. Even movies that are viewed in class are subject to these same policies and challenges.

“We do teach classes, we teach database research works and citing your sources,” Gabrielle Weston, a FHN Learning Commons Media Specialist said. “A lot of our staff use DVDs for their curriculum, too.”

When the original Missouri Senate Bill 775 was passed in 2022, banning explicit materials from being provided to students, libraries across the state reviewed the content on their shelves to ensure it all complied. The Media Specialists across FHSD were much included in this large-scale reappraisal.

“When that bill was passed two or so years ago, before we even checked anything out, we pulled every graphic novel and reviewed every page,” Weston said. “We worked with each other to decide, in terms of making sure, is this appropriate to have in our space or do we need to weed it out?”

A lot goes into the behind-the-scenes of creating and passing policies like these. While the district policies were set in motion by the Board of Education, they ran these policies by Media Specialists and district-level curriculum coordinators before making their final votes on them.

“Us librarians were invited to a meeting over the summer where we discussed the language of the policy,” Weston said. “We didn’t necessarily have a say in the passing of the policy, but we did have the opportunity to collaborate and have an idea of what would be passed and the language from the original draft that we eventually changed together.”

The way the final policies turned out were accepted by the masses, though members of the district have yet to attempt to ban a single book. It is the role of the school to provide a fair education to all students, so long as it’s deemed developmentally appropriate. Just because one person believes a text or material should be removed from the library does not mean that everyone will agree with them.

“In order for our students to be informed about issues, they need to have access to all of the arguments, all of the sides, all of the information, so they can make their own informed decisions rather than what we tell them to believe, or we prevent them from even having the possibility of believing,” Lammers said. “That’s not our role. Our role is to give them access to the information so they can make critical decisions for themselves, and if we get in the way of that, that can be dangerous. That can be dangerous and can run counter to the basic tenets of living in a democratic system.”